Bishop's Epistle: THE GODHEAD DEBATE COMMENCES (Early Church History 200-400 AD)

Excerpted from author's book entitled, "Godhead Theology."

With the coming of a group of men called the Christian Apologists, the Modalistic Monarchian view begins to be challenged. J. N. D. Kelly, as has already been mentioned, points out that the apologists INAUGURATED a movement of thought that was alien to the Christology of either the Apostles of our Lord, or the Apostolic Fathers. The apologists were: Quadratus (dies A.D. 129); Justin Martyr (A.D. 100-165), Athenagoras of Athens (A.D. 133-190), Tertullian (A.D. 160-250), and Origen (A.D. 244, his debate with Beryllus. [It is stated in some historical records that Origen debated Beryllus, Bishop of Bostra, and converted him from Modalistic Monarchianism. What is actually true, however, is that Beryllus was suspected of the heresy of Adoptionism, which is called in modern times Dynamic Monarchianism. Origen’s confrontation with him was on those grounds. It is doubtful that Beryllus adopted Origen’s view (which was not the Trinity but Subordinationism), but is likely that Origen helped him come correct from his misguided form of Monarchianism. One must always read history through the filter of facts.])

We should not speak of the apologists without first taking at least a brief look at the cradle of their thought. For this we look to Alexandria, Egypt. According to Alex Hislop, “Two Babylons,” and H. G. Wells, “The Outline of History” the idea of the Trinity began in Babylon and moved with the flow of civilization from Babylon to Egypt, and from Egypt to Greece, and then into the whole world. In Babylon the trinity was Nimrod, Tammuz, and Semiramis. As the religion spread, its deities remained the same, only their names changed. In Egypt Nimrod became Osiris, Tammuz became Horus, and Semiramis became Isis. When this Trinity spread to Greece Osiris became Serapis, Isis remained Isis, and Horus became Harpocrates. The same gods remained in each culture, only their names changed!

(After the Greek conquest of Egypt under Alexander the Great, and on the orders of Ptolemy I, Serapis was devised during the 3rd century B. C. as a means to unify the Greeks and Egyptians in his realm. ("Sarapis" in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 15th edn., 1992, Vol. 10, p. 447.) Ptolemy's policy was to find a deity that should win the reverence of both groups. Therefore, the Greeks melded Osiris with their underworld god, Hades, to produce the essentially Alexandrian syncretism, Serapis. They further, transformed the Egyptian Horus into their Hellenistic god known as Harpocrates, a rendering from Egyptian Har-pa-khered or Heru-pa-khered (meaning “Horus the Child”). (1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 13).

Alexandria was made a great center of learning by Ptolemy I, who built there a magnificent library and temple for the worship of the trinity of Greece, Egypt and Babylon. Engraved over the archway entering into the temple of Serapis, Isis and Harpocrates was the description: “They are each other, they are three, but they are also one.” (This formula would later appear in Christian Trinitarian theology as: “Three persons in One God.” The “they are each other” clause integrated into trinitarian doctrine as the total consubstantiation of all three hypostases of the Trinity, which affirms that the Father is in the Son and Holy Spirit and personally taking part in all they do—the Son is in the Father and Holy Spirit and experiencing all they do—and the Holy Spirit is in the Father and the Son experiencing and taking part in all they do.) This idea of a hypostatic-union between three separate and distinct beings does not come from any Hebrew thought, nor from early Christian theology. The seed had been conceived in the false gods of Babylon and permeated all ancient civilizations of the time of Christ. By the time of the apologist (A.D. 150-250) the “three in one” concept had adopted the Christian garments of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Monarchian feels today, just as he did 1800 years ago: Although the names are Christian, the gods hail from Babylon.

To a Greek philosopher by the name of Plato fell the task of making the trinity of the pagan world palatable to a society that was vastly more scientific. In Plato’s system of gods he takes the three-ness of the pagan thought and sophisticates it into Greek thinking. Plato’s godhead consisted of Mind, Word or Logos and the World Spirit. To Plato the ‘Mind’ (first principle) was ineffable, thus, too exalted to be touched by matter; then Plato’s ‘Word,’ or ‘Logos’ (the second principal) was brought into existence as the intermediate being. It was a function of the logos to create—a job that the ‘Mind’ (first principle) was to transcendent to do. Together, the ‘Mind,’ and the ‘Logos’ produced a third personality which Plato called the ‘World Spirit.’ By this idea, Platonic thought had moved the pagan trinity into a position of acceptance by the intelligentsia of any age.

The Alexandrian school was Platonic; from this theology of Mind, Word, and Spirit came a disciple of Plato’s by the name of Philo. Philo was a Jew of Alexandria who was a world-class philosopher in his own right. He live from 20 BC to A.D. 54—which means he was a contemporary to Jesus. Plato’s faith in God came from his Jewish faith, but his concept of God came from the philosophical speculations of Alexandria. The influence of Platonism and the Stoics on Philo cannot be over stated. In the Mind – Word – Spirit system of Plato, Philo conceived of the ‘Mind’ as the Hebrew God Yahweh; in Plato’s ‘Word’ Philo finds an identity with the Jewish Messiah; He (at times) called the Logos a separate person from God; the mediator between God and man.

According to Emil Schurer (Emil Shurer D.D., M.A.: (1844-1910) German theologian, best know for his study in Jewish customs in the time of Christ.), Philo “agrees in the most essential points with the great teachers of the Greeks. Nay, Philo has so profoundly absorbed their doctrines and so peculiarly worked them up into a new whole, as himself to belong to the series of Greek philosophers. His system may, on the whole, be entitled an eclectic one: Platonic, Stoic, and Neo-Pythagorean doctrines being the most prominent. Just in proportion as now one now the other was embraced, has he been designated at one time Platonist, at another a Pythagorean. He might just as correctly be called a Stoic, for the influence of Stocism was at least as strong upon him as that of Platonism or Neo-Pythagoreanism.”

Where Plato and the Stoics left off, Philo picked up. Plato took the crude, base gods of the heathen, stripped them of their trappings of superstitions, and dressed them up in much scientific rhetoric. Then enter Philo with his fantastic fantasy; he set forth his far-fetched (fetch from afar – Babylon) idea of Hebraizing Plato!?! Or, was he Hellenizing the Prophets?

Philo saw himself as having a dual mission. To make the Jew Greek and the Greek Jew. Through the means of his ‘allegorical interpretation’ of the Pentateuch he was able to see there all the things taught by Greek philosophy which he conceived as enlightened. Philo was convinced that the Greeks had acquired their wisdom from Moses and saw himself as the bridge between his co-religionist and the philosophies.

In Philo’s doctrine of God, he begin at the point of fundamental dualism: that God and matter are not in communion (here is revealed his Gnostics tendencies). God is totally good and perfect—the created universe with man at the center is imperfect and not good in the since of being un-corruptible. “An acting, therefore, of God upon the world and in the world is, according to Philo, only possible through the intervention of intermediate causes, of interposing powers who establish an intercourse between God and the world” (Schurer). Philo’s intervening causes are Plato’s ideas, the Stoic’s active causes, the Jewish angels, and the Greek daemons. All these add up to Philo’s logos. If, according to this they appear to be individual hypostases, or personal beings, Philo makes other assertions that forbids us to take them as such. It is expressly stated that they exist only in the Divine thought. The truth of the matter is this: Philo conceived of them both as independent hypostases and as immanent determinations of the divine existence. According to Eduard Zeller, Philo’s system required the necessity of these contradiction: “He combines both definitions without observing their contradiction, nay, he is unable to observe it, because otherwise the intermediary rôle assigned to the divine powers would be forfeited, even that double nature, the reason of which they are on the one hand to be identical with God, that a participation in the Deity may by their means be possible to the finite, and on the other hand different from Him, that the Deity, notwithstanding this participation, they remain apart from all contact with the world.”

As a help to arrive at an understanding of Philo’s doctrine of the Logos, we could do no better that Eduard Zeller ((1814-1908), German philosopher, was born at Kleinbottwar in Wurttemberg on the 22nd of January 1814, and educated at the university of Tubingen and under the influence of Hegel. In 1840 he was Privatdozent of theology at Tubingen, in 1847 professor of theology at Bern, in 1849 professor of theology at Marburg, migrating soon afterwards to the faculty of philosophy as the result of disputes with the Clerical party. He became professor of philosophy at Heidelberg in 1862, removed to Berlin in 1872, and retired in 1895. His great work is his Philosophie der Griechen (184452).. This book he continued to amplify and improve in the light of further research; the last edition appeared in 1902. It has been translated into most of the European languages and became the recognized text-book of Greek philosophy. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911): “By the Logos, Philo understands the power of God or the active Divine intelligence in general; he designated it as the idea which comprises all other ideas, the power which comprises all powers in itself, as the entirety of the supersensuous world or of the divine powers.” Is the vicegerent and ambassador of God; neither created nor uncreated; the instrument by which God made the world’s. The logos is, thus, identified with the creative ‘word’ of God. Further, the logos, then, is the high priest of God to the world, and of the world to God. Making God known to the world, and the world known to God. “The definitions, which, according to the presuppositions of our thought, would require the personality of the logos, are crossed by Philo by such as make it impossible, and the peculiarity of his mode of conception consist in his not perceiving the contradiction involved in making the idea of the logos oscillate obscurely between personal and impersonal being. This peculiarity is equally misunderstood, when Philo’s logos is regarded absolutely as a person separate from God; and, when on the contrary, it is suppose that it only denotes God under a definite relation, according to the aspect of His activity. According to Philo’s opinion the logos is both, but for this very reason neither one nor the other exclusively; and he does not perceive, that it is impossible to combine these definitions into one notion.” (Zeller iii. 2. p. 378.)

“But Philo cannot dispense with these definitions. With him the logos, like all the Divine powers, is only necessary, because the supreme God Himself can enter into no direct contact with the finite; it must stand between the two and be the medium of their mutual relation; and how can it be this unless it were different from both, if it were only a certain Divine property? In this case we should have again that direct action of God upon finite things, which Philo declares is inadmissible. On the other hand the Logos must now indeed be again identical with each of the opposites which it was to reconcile, it must likewise be a property of God as a power operative in the world. Philo could not without contradiction succeed in combining the two.” (Zeller iii. 2. p. 380.) As remarkable as it may seem, however, this very thing is done in Modalism’s teaching of the Deity of Christ and His humanity—i.e. His dual nature. He is, indeed identical with both elements He is reconciling and yet a property of God operating in the world.

Philo was, as it seems, the first to suggest that the Logos was the intermediate being between God and the world. The building blocks for his doctrine lay in both Jewish theology and Greek philosophy. Philo took from the Jewish theology the idea of the Spirit and the Word of God, then from Greek philosophy he took chiefly the doctrine of the Wisdom of God. Utilizing for his purpose the Platonic doctrine of ideas and the world spirit, or soul. But it is the Stoic doctrine of the deity as the active reason of the world, which is the nearest to his. “We need only to strip off from this Stoic doctrine of the Logos, it’s pantheistic element by distinguishing the Logos from the Deity, and it’s materialistic element by distinguishing it from organized matter, to have the Philonean Logos complete.” (Zeller iii. 2, 385.)

Now that we have a little understanding of Philo’s contribution to our discussion, we will proceed to discover how he made an impact upon a segment of the Christian faith.

Bible scholars John McClintock and James Strong explain: “Towards the end of the 1st century, and during the 2d, many learned men came over both from Judaism and paganism to Christianity. These brought with them into the Christian schools of theology their Platonic ideas and phraseology.” (Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 1891, Vol. 10, "Trinity," p. 553.)

Out of this nest (Alexandria) of worldly philosophy grew a Christian church (of a sort). From this swap of paganism arose the citadel to the “Logos Christology” of Plato and Philo. From this Fortress marched forth the warriors of darkness proclaiming Light—illuminating none—but blinding and binding all. The Trinitarian’s of all ages since can look to one Alexandrian bishop and proclaim, “O Captain, My captain” this Bishop is Clement of Alexandria. Not to be confused with the saint from Rome.

We need to look, for just a moment of time, to Clement of Alexandria. This will give us an understanding of this school’s three greatest apostles, Justin Martyr, Origen and Arius. Clement writes concerning the philosophies: “The multitude, are frightened at the Hellenic philosophy as children are at mask, fearing list it should lead them astray.” (One is able to detect the contempt for the common people in this statement from Clement of Alexandria; the same contempt that Tertullian displayed in his statement concerning the Monarchians.) Clement of Alexandria is full of the thought that the mission of the Christian theologian is to build a bridge between the Gospel and the Gentile wisdom; to point out the relations of Christianity to universal knowledge, to give the religion of Christ a scientific form. Clement of Alexandria writes much about the philosophy of the Greeks. He says on more than one occasion that their philosophy was of divine origin, although he occasionally makes their wisdom a plagiarism from the Hebrew prophets. “The Greek philosophy” says Clement of Alexandria, “purges the soul, as it were, and prepares it before hand for the reception of faith, on which the Truth builds up the edifice of knowledge.” The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the “Holy Triad.” The prevailing view is that of the Son as a distinct hypothesis. The Logos is said to undergo no change, and the distinction of imminent and spoken Logos is rejected. The Logos is conceived of, after the manner of the Stoics, as the seminal reason diffused in all beings to whom reason is given. the Holy Spirit as well as the Logos, is spoken of as a distinct hypostasis from the Father. (See on Clement: George Park Fisher, “History of Christian Doctrin)

Therefore, from this cradle of Platonic philosophical speculations spring forth upon the landscape of the Lord’s church this army of black knights, intent upon forging an unholy marriage between Christianity and philosophy; but before Christianity can take a new husband, the first must be killed. Thus, the attack on Modalistic Monarchianism begins.

Apostolically Speaking
☩ David Ignatius